Paul Wolfowitz is to be commended for rejecting Ariel Sharon's heavy-handed, aggressive, land-grabbing policies, which can only lead to more bloodshed, and has, essentially, labeled him an extremist. Less is more. May peace at last break out in this troubled region, as a spirit of tolerance and generosity reign over all...

Now that it is painfully apparent that the mission in Iraq - whatever it is - is far from over, the President has disavowed what, at the time, was hailed as one of the most dramatic "photo ops" ever staged for an American politician.

"The ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign, of course, was put up by the members of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, saying their mission was accomplished," Mr. Bush asserted during a Rose Garden news conference. "I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff. They weren’t that ingenious, by the way."

This surely was a Pinocchio moment for the President but, amazingly, his nose didn’t seem to grow one bit. And the White House press corps, polite to a fault, didn’t erupt in a well-deserved chant of "Liar, liar, pants on fire!"

Mr. Bush’s backpedaling also must have been news to his political staff, who had gleefully - and publicly - taken credit for orchestrating every element of the event, down to directing that the ship be turned so that winds were light and the backdrop for the speech was open ocean instead of the nearby skyline of San Diego.

In truth, the White House communications staff had approved the banner and produced it. The sailors hung it up, and the message to the world couldn’t have been clearer.

When a free mind is disinterested, God is compelled to come into it

"A philosopher named Avicenna said: "The rank of a disinterested mind is so high that what it sees is true, what it desires comes to pass, what it commands must be done." You may take this for the truth, that when a free mind is disinterested, God is compelled to come into it; and if it could get along without contigent forms, it would then have all the properties of God himself."

- Meister Eckhart, "About Disinterest"

How many folks in the Media, or indeed, nearly any other profession, church or political organization is truly disinterested, impartial? Supporting a special interest is, de facto, interested...not disinterested. Partial. Biased. And even if the party pretends to be fair and balanced, they themselves are partial, interested...and usually paid for being so.

God does not come to these people. Don't expect any high wisdom or anything else godly to issue therefrom. Indeed, you may find that it is as far from God as you can get. God did not, would not, work for Bush. But Tony Snow did, as did Brit Hume. But alas the same thing would apply to Jim Carville...but he never pretended to be speaking for God or from God's little corner.

And consider the case of Frank Luntz, who tricked us, via MSNBC, into thinking he was an impartial questioneer, as he led a supposedly undecided (regarding recount) group of voters...into the Bush camp. Should Gore just give up?

Why did Luntz do this to us? Why did MSNBC? GE? And why did the entire media machine follow suit?

Most of these insufferable bloviators are partial, as I said, for money. Money can buy them more and more things, and make them more attractive in the eyes of the shallow. Many good matches follow. Shallow couples breeding shallow, partial notions. And yet the more things they accumulate, the farther and farther away from God and the truth they become. As Eckhart (from whom God hid nothing) says: "Keep this in mind: to be full of things is to be empty of God, while to be empty of things is to be full of God."

People need to really begin to understand this equation.

Many people get the false notion that non-conservatives think God should just go away, or that he or she doesn't really exist. But I think this is a wrong assumption. It is rather that God is intensely personal, not intensely public...and should remain that way. And as such, non-conservatives do often have intensely personal relations with God, and his close ally, the Truth.

Imagine a stock market where the value lay in one's personal connection with God. How topsy-turvy the world would become. Suddenly the poor are the most highly prized, for as Eckhart said in his "Talks of Instruction": "The more things we keep for ourselves, the less we have his love; the less we own things, the more we shall own Him and His... When we get rid of outward things, in return, God shall give us all that heaven contains, yes, heaven and all its powers, and all that flows out of God. Whatever the saints and angels have shall be ours as much as theirs."

Jeez! That sounds almost as good as stock options at Enron! Maybe even better!

People, readjust. The rat race is for rats. Screw the raise and seek the rays.

"For of all his gifts, gifts of nature, gifts of grace, not one was made with the idea that that we should regard them as property...and in order to teach us that, to impress it on us, he frequently takes away everything, physical and spiritual. We are to have what we have as if it were loaned to us and not given; to be without proprietary rights to body or soul, mind or faculties, worldly goods or honors, friends, relations, houses, castles, or anything else."

FLASH FROM THE FUTURE
In the future, there will be a movie called "Fahrenheit 9/11" or "Seabiscuit" or something like that. Watch it. It will change the way you look at your president. Or horses. Something like that.

cus all
my feelings are more
than i can let by
or not
more than you've got
just follow the day

follow the day and reach for the sun!

you don't see me flyin to the red
one more you're done
just follow the seasons and find the time
reach for the bright side
you don't see me flyin to the red
one more you're nuts
just follow the day
follow the day and reach for the sun

just follow the day
follow the day and reach for the

you don't see me flyin to the red
one more you're nuts
just follow the seasons and find the time
reach for the bright side
you don't see me flyin to the red
one more you're nuts
just follow the day
follow the day and reach for the sun!

“They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff,” she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network’s Web site. “It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about,” she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.

"they are not going to listen attentively to the speech of the American president, first, because the consecutive American administrations, in the past 50 years, supported those regimes ... And because all true democracies in the world came as a result of internal struggle, not due to foreign intervention, particularly American."

Friday, November 07, 2003

OK folks. Time to show your winnings!
Who among us has benefitted from this war? I haven't....monetarily or otherwise. And chances are...99% of us will never see a benefit. All we will ever see is the bill...and the blood.
NOT a good deal.

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Say what the Media are Afraid to Say

You are playing into the hands of of your real opponent. Stop chewing each other up. Instead bring out the big guns and level them at Bush and Company.

Say the things the media are too timid to say. Read Buzzflash for a good start. There is hardly anyone better at siphoning out the goods and listing them on one page. Many great sources, really. To simply say what everybody already knows is to say nothing at all. As Ogilvy says, "You can't bore someone into buying your product."

Use the time remaining wisely. Eight people blasting at Bush for a dozen hours can be way more effect, and inexpensive, than a hundred paid advertisements.

Who is the opponent? Dean? Clark? Edwards? No...it is Bush the Preemptor. Replace him. The world demands it.

On Exploiting Decent People

Basically there are two types of people. Decent people, on the one hand, and exploiters, on the other.

Exploiters know that decent people will not stand being exploited, and so they create chaos, confusion and other distractions like Sports and Ideology in order to hide the fact that they are indeed being exploited.

Millions of Americans can tell you who won this or that game, but ask them about atrocities this country is committing around the globe, and they glaze over or deny it because it wasn't mentioned during the 18 minutes allotted for nightly news. Even the 24-hour "news" shows rehash the same old stuff during their 48 minute cycle. (I may be wrong on the exact minutes, but one does have to allow for commercials...which more and more often come disguised as news...thus supplanting bigger stories. Ever see a news item on Viagra? [See: Product Placement])

But sports is not the only tool these exploiters have in their arsenal. They also have very confusing ideology. Try reading some of the "conservative scholars" and note how exploitation is disguised as so much philosophy.

Decent people don't need ideology to prop themselves up. They know how to do the decent thing, and assume that other decent people do too. But a lot of decent people are being snookered by the exploiters, and are even being recruited to do their gruntwork. They drink the kool-ade, the ideology, and think they are so clever because they now have a philosophy to back up their yet-to-be-transcended egoism and selfishness. And they think that, one day, they will be able to rise to the top of the pack -- forgetting that they are just becoming a dog in the process.

Now don't get me wrong...dogs are fine creatures. The epitome of loyalty. But loyalty, as the cliche goes, can be blind. And oftentimes it is. Many a dog has a cruel master.

But the hope is, I suspect, that they too may become the cruel master himself.

Now Jesus was no cruel master. Nor was Gandhi, Buddha, Eckhart or Doctor-King. Nor were they exploiters. They were, in fact, decent people. Decent people exploited and tortured by cruel masters.

Rising to the Top

Look at the top. Do you really think you would be comfortable there? Are these the people you really want to hang out with? I guess it depends on which top you are speaking of...right? I, for example, would find it tremendously boring to spend my spare moments with John Ashcroft, Neil Boortz, Dick Cheney, Jerry Falwell or the Dubster himself. But to hang out with, say, top-level comedians, entertainers, artists, musicians, scholars, writers...well this might not be so bad. Certainly not nearly as boring. And why waste your time trying to get ahead, when once you get there you are bored out of your mind. Even Bill Gates would cause me to glaze over.

Are you sure you are in the right profession? Have you really considered where, and with whom, you might wind up?

And if it's the money you are after, have you never considered that 95% of the people will never know how much, or little, you have...and that the other five percent don't care? Do what you love. Find, or create, your future community. No man is an ithsmus. On second thought...maybe all men are ithsmi.

Women, of course, are continents.

The Evolution of Cooperation

People try to divide people into Liberals and Conservatives, but I think it makes more sense to divide them into exploiters and decent people, irrespectively.

Neitzsche once said that people are greater artists than they imagine, and indeed, most people seem to live in an imaginary world where, for example, sports scores have import to life. This is, of course, ridiculous. And yet we see people killing each other over these trumped up distraction sports businesses, and their all-important competition.
You know, competition...what real mean do to each other. Compete and go to war. Cooperation is for girls and metrosexuals.

Layer upon layer the hoodwinks blind the exploited and protect the exploiters.

Decent people don't steal, cheat, lie and kill...and are not in a me-first game of winners and losers. Decent people look out for those who are downtrodden, even at the expense of their own time and treasure.

I hope America can realize, literally, its own decency, and shake off the chains of ideology at least enough to cause a few good ripples of human decency. It will save us from ourselves and the world. The world of exploiters.

Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Congressman Jim Leach, one of the very best and most respectable Republicans in American government, has now come out against the madness that has been unleashed upon Iraq, saying: "I think that is one of the most misguided assumptions in the history of United States' strategic thinking".

Metrosexual Smartmob Nexus

or... Republicans are so 20th Century

Whiny wuss and "real man", Mark Steyn, thinks he has discovered something new. Something called the "metrosexual". Now he thinks he is Magellen, but in fact he is not even Ellen. He is only parroting the words of his dopehead doctator, Rush Limbaugh...who rants, or ranted, on and on about metrosexuals. This fact alone should cause responsible parents to walk the other way...but Steyn is a rebel, an iconoclast, a real Bob Roberts...and the times are a-changing...back. At least in the minds of these 20th Century centurians.

But what are these "Uniters Not Dividers" up to? Well...they are up to their usual -- i.e. dividing. Oh! You're not a homo? Well you must be a homo sympathizer! Now they just call it by the name, metrosexual. Lynchings may not be far behind. In fact, now that it is uncool to harass gays, these dittohead freeper types may well start targeting metrosexuals for liquidation, as it is now famously called by adipose wrecks of the reich.

For a take on how women feel about metrosexuals, take a look at blogstress, Iddybud, who always has the most marvelous things to say on a wide variety of subjects...

Monday, November 03, 2003

and/or Death of Earth

To puff the blaziness on. Poffpoff. And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers there'll be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care. So true is it that therewhere's a turnover the tay is wet too and when you think you ketch sight of a hind make sure but you're cocked by a hin.

- James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake"

Early Monday, Paal Brekke, deputy project manager of the SOHO spacecraft, was still digesting the significance of the three additional outbursts on top of two back-to-back monster flares Oct. 28 and 29.
"I think the last week will go into the history books as one of the most dramatic periods of solar activity we have seen in modern time," Brekke told SPACE.com.

Sunday, November 02, 2003

One of the greatest sins is that the soldiers are overworked, poorly paid wage slaves, who give the greatest sacrifice while the companies for whom they kill reap all the rewards. And should they actually have to serve time in Hell --apparently an even worse place than Iraq -- well, this is not a good bargain at all. Is it?

Soldiers should be issued stocks in Halliburton, Bechtel, FOX, GE, the pharmaceutical companies, and those mere few who can actually claim they are winning something tangible in the war.

Tired of Democrats being shat upon? Well imagine what will happen if Democrats take back the White House... I frankly don't look forward to more Clinton-bashing foisted upon Dean, Clark or Edwards. These are good men who do not deserve the Republican evildoers doing them in as well.

Maybe we should drop out, quit our jobs, live simply, and let America see how bad the Republicans really are. They sure have a good jumpstart...not to mention a 3 year honeymoon for grand dragon Bush.

There is a turd floating around the toilet just screaming to be flushed. His name is Zell Miller, and he is creating a stink in the Democratic Party.
A Maddox and Condit apologist, the redneck codger has lost touch with us colored people, and should be recalled immediately. As a Southerner, I bemoan the return of backboneless backwoods bigotry as typified by Miller.

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About Me

Social Media Humorist & author of "The Great Chain of Conversation", and composer of "Powwowiraqsi" and other love songs. Lover of wit, charm, grace, music, wisdom, nature, spirit, art & humanity. Cured hiccups (breathe in a slow continuous figure-8). Wordjones. Composer. Idea Consultant. Social Media Advisor. Connecting the good and great for the greater good.